The plan *had* been to get to class good & early, in order to give me plenty of time to film stuff. I needed to have the two versions (one for each team) of Ala Shat el Bahr el Howa to date (I'd hoped to add the next chorus, but it wasn't essential. I also wanted to film the figure 8 combinations that I'll teach first thing in January, and the hip drop combinations for the second week. I'd also hoped to get a few runthroughs of En Rah Menek Ya Ain, and film a couple of them.

But EVERYTHING takes longer than you think it's going to take.

It took several goes at Ala Shat, but I got it all in the end. There's one section where I lose the thread a bit, but if that's all, then it's ok. I'll caption it on the film itself. And I got the figure 8 combos done, but not the hip drop ones, and no chance at En Rah Menek whatsoever. Oh well, there's still the possibility of recording stuff on Thursday...

Anyhow, by then the students started arriving, and it was a case of making sure I understood the workings of the new TV & DVD player.

The video night went very well, and my students were good at picking out the differences between American dancers, Turkish dancers (well, "dancer" singular- I've only got one Turkish DVD), Lebanese and Egyptian dancers. I didn't inflict too much Fifi or Suhair on them, I was going for the more contemporary dancers. Although that's quite difficult because although there's a lot of YT footage of dancers like Aziza and Camelia, there's not much in the way of proper DVDs. I ended up showing them the performances on a couple of the Raqia technique DVDs. This brought a MASSIVE unintentional laugh at the end of the evening. We'd just been watching Kassoumi dancing Akteb Aleik (that song is everywhere, I swear!) and straight after her, there's a male dancer, in practice gear, doing a very Pharaonic number which was clearly Art, but not terribly good art. It's a Hoot! I'm expecting to see Pharaonic posing going on in all the improv next term.